Google has agreed to change the way it implements Europe's new "right to be forgotten" measure after being criticised for being over-zealous in its approach to blocking results in name-based searches.

More than 70,000 people have asked Google to delete links to articles about them after a ruling in May by the European court of justice. The Guardian, Daily Mail and BBC complained when Google removed links to some pages when searches are made against particular names.

The BBC's economics editor, Robert Peston, said Google had cast him into oblivion after a 2007 blogpost he wrote about the former Merrill Lynch boss Stan O'Neal was excluded from some search results.

Peter Barron, Google's director of communications for Europe, said the US company could be clearer in the way it informed publishers about search-term deletions.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Barron said Google was undergoing a "learning process" about how to implement the ruling, but denied it was deliberately trying to subvert the judgment by being too quick to remove links when requests were made.

Barron said Peston had wrongly assumed that O'Neal had made the removal request, when in fact it had come from a member of the public who had left a comment on the post.

But when challenged on the programme by Peston himself, Barron agreed that Google should give publishers more information about search-term deletions.

Peston said: "It was an inevitable reaction by me, when I got the email from Google saying my particular story was no longer going to be searchable, to think that it was being cast into oblivion, because that's what the email implied."

Barron responded: "That's very fair feedback. That is something we are looking at. It is completely understandable that Robert assumed that it was Stan O'Neal who made the complaint. So that's something we'll look at. We could perhaps say 'bear in mind it may not be the person you think it is'."

Barron pointed out that Peston's post was still widely available through almost all search terms. "Only if you search for the very narrow term of the name of the commentator would it not appear [on a Google search]," he said.

He added: "We have to balance the need for transparency with the need to protect people's identities."

Asked whether Google thought the ruling was workable, Barron said: "It is clearly a difficult process. We are committed to doing it as responsibly as we possibly can. We are learning as we go. I'm sure we will get better at it and we are very keen to listen to the feedback."

Six links to Guardian stories have been removed from some search results, three of them about a 2010 controversy involving a now-retired Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who admitted lying about awarding a penalty in the Scottish FA Cup. The links have since been reinstated and can be found on searches for McDonald's name.

A Guardian News & Media spokeswoman said the company was concerned that Google was pursuing an "overly broad interpretation" of the ECJ ruling.

Barron defended the way Google has responded to the court's judgment. He said: "The material that has been removed, certainly in the case of the Stan O'Neal blog, was very much in line with the ruling."

He added: "The European court of justice ruling was not something that we wanted, but it is now the law in Europe, and we are obliged to comply with that law. We are aiming to deal with it as responsibly as possible. We have had more than 70,000 requests so far. It's a very big process, it's a learning process, we are listening to the feedback and we are working our way through that."